All government schemes deserve suspicion, but especially those that sound nice. This is particularly the case when it comes to feeding children.
This year’s farm bill — whether the Senate or the House version — contains enough junk to infuriate everyone but its beneficiaries. However, one program has eluded criticism, both in Congress and in the administration. Everyone seems to like the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP). Launched in 2002 as a pilot program in five states, it provides free fruit and vegetable snacks to schoolchildren.
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Once the project began, “amazing things started to happen,” according to a
report by the Produce for Better Health Foundation. For instance, did you know that, once students were given free fruits and vegetables, students “ate more fruits and vegetables”? In addition, a principal is quoted as saying, “This program has provided each teacher the opportunity to be seen as more human, with personal feelings, likes and dislikes.” Thanks to vegetables, teachers no longer appear to be in a vegetative state to their students. If that’s not enough reason to endorse the program, I don’t know what is.
Nowadays, children no longer suffer from lack of food but from too much of the wrong kind. Obesity is the peril du jour. Now that overconsumption has replaced hunger as the biggest threat to children’s health, the federal government wants to expand so that children won’t.
Both versions of the farm bill would extend FFVP to every state in the country. The USDA
estimated that expanding the snack program nationwide, to every school and every student, as many members of Congress wish, would cost $4.5 billion — just under the entire cost of the separate national school-lunch program in 1995 ($5 billion).
The FFVP is the latest in a series of nutrition programs launched by the government. The Associated Press investigated 57 of these programs, which cost over a billion dollars annually, and
found “mostly failure.” The reason should be obvious to anyone who’s ever been younger than twelve: Kids don’t like broccoli, even if it’s free.
Students throw away fruits and vegetables more than any other food, according to a 2002 GAO
report. Wasted food costs the government $600 million every year, with fruits and vegetables accounting for 42 percent of that waste. And yet, the government wants to spend
more on fruits and veggies.
In public schools, the government gets to decide what goes in people’s heads as well as what goes inside their stomachs, and it is gradually strengthening its monopoly over the latter.
In January 2001, the Clinton administration tried to ban “competitive foods” from school cafeterias. That month, the USDA sent a
report to Congress boasting that schools were meeting federal nutrition standards before noting that “students do not always select these nutritious school meals.” Vending machines were to blame, because they gave students too many options, most of them bad. The government despises competitive foods not only because they are innutritious but also because they are, in a word, competitive.
